There were 1,300 people in my college freshman class, 45 of us black. I've lived in some mixed and mostly black neighborhoods since then, but it was there in college, surrounded by wealth and privilege, power and whiteness, that I witnessed the most people using drugs.

Michelle Alexander, Ohio State law professor and author of 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,' will be giving the 3rd annual Justice Revius Ortique Lecture on Law and Society at Dillard University on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Georges Auditorium of the Professional Schools and Sciences Building.Dillard University

I don't remember any police raids. I don't remember flashing blue lights, people being led away in handcuffs, let alone anybody being sent to prison. We were in a no-arrest zone. Not so the weed smokers a few blocks away. It was open season on them because, as we all know, drugs are bad.

Drugs aren't as bad as the war the United States has declared on them. Most developed countries recognize drug abuse as a public health issue and emphasize treatment. But our country treats mere possession of drugs as a moral failing worthy of imprisonment. Consequently, the U.S. has imprisoned "a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid," law professor Michelle Alexander writes. Those who return from prison are essentially second class citizens.

If you believe that sentences for drug offenders are too long, Alexander will say you don't fully appreciate the problem. Sentences are too long, she argues, but even those sentenced to probation for felonies wear a scarlet F the rest of their days.

"Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon," she writes, "the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal."

The United States, land of the free, is the world leader in incarceration. We make peace with that by telling ourselves that our system is colorblind. But there's no way a race neutral system could do what ours is doing. In New Orleans, 1 of every 7 black men is either in prison or on probation or parole. In Washington, D.C., Alexander notes, 75 percent of black men are expected to go to prison. In Chicago, "the total population of black males ... with a felony record (including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55 percent of the black adult male population and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce." Across Illinois, 90 percent of those imprisoned for drug crimes are black.

Alexander writes, "If 100 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses were African American, the situation would provoke outrage," but to our shame, she says, we tell ourselves that 90 percent can be logically and morally justified. It can't be.

Alexander blames Republican presidents for starting a drug war, but she blames Democrats for its escalation. She cites an observation from the Justice Policy Institute that Bill Clinton's "policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history." Clinton fixed it so that a person convicted of marijuana possession could never get food stamps, she writes.

Clinton possessed marijuana, you'll remember. He didn't inhale, though. Barack Obama did, and his life would likely have been thrown off the rails with an arrest. And yet, Alexander writes, "Obama's budget for law enforcement is actually worse than the Bush administration's in terms of the ratio of dollars devoted to prevention and drug treatment as opposed to law enforcement." Better to be a hypocrite than perceived as soft on crime.

Alexander's book is tough to read. Nobody wants to believe that our country is participating in a human rights scandal this epic in scale. But it is happening on our watch. What are we going to do about it?